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Sometimes you just need to get away from the ringing phones and all that jazz …

Carolyn and I hopped in the car on Tuesday morning and went down to my dad’s vacation home on beautiful Lake Canandaigua, one of the Finger Lakes in Western New York, for some peace and quiet. The place is perched on a cliff right on the edge of the lake, and the development is mostly deserted in the winter.

Friday night, we tuned into the Sci-Fi Channel (which we can’t get in Canada; we get the terrific Canadian alternative, Space: The Imagination Station, instead), and watched two episodes of the new Doctor Who (the series aired a year ago in Canada, but I didn’t see all the episodes then). Actually, I’d see one of these episodes (the one about the people gathering on a space station to watch the Earth be incinerated as the sun expanded billions of years from now), but the other — with Charles Dickens — was new to both of us. Anyway, they were both terrific.

And on Saturday, we went into Rochester, New York (about an hour away), to catch an absolutely terrific production of one of my all-time favorite plays, Inherit the Wind, at the Geva Theatre. The Clarence Darrow character was played by JG Hertzler, known to Star Trek fans as Klingon General Martok from Deep Space Nine. He was excellent, as was John Pribyl, the fellow who played the William Jennings Bryan character. It was a truly excellent production, much better than the one I saw at Stratford (Ontario) a few years ago. (Pictures.)

Today, we drove home (about four hours) listening to an unabridged reading of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, which is just terrific.

Tomorrow, I’m off to York University, to speak to Paul Fayter’s class. Paul is teaching Mindscan this semester. And on Tuesday, I’m doing another episode of More 2 Life with Mary Ito on TVOntario — that’s live in Ontario at 2:00 p.m.